Oxfam: Richest 1% own nearly half of world's wealth

Jan. 20, 2014
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A women cleans a display case for the Audi S3 Sportback automobile, part of a promotion for Audi AG, during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. / Simon Dawson, Bloomberg

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify confusion between two sets of numbers in the report.

Almost half of the world's wealth is owned by just 1% of the world's population, according to a report published just days before the start of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, where the topic of rapidly increasing income disparities will be a major focus.

In its study titled Working for the Few, the British-founded development charity Oxfam concludes that the $110 trillion wealth of the 1% richest people on the planet is some 65 times the total wealth of those floundering at the "bottom half" of the world's population.

Further, this poorer "bottom half" now has about the same amount of money as the richest 85 people in the world, and the wealthiest grew their share of bounty in 24 out of 26 countries surveyed between 1980 and 2012, the study says. The research was compiled using data from Credit Suisse's World Wealth report and the Forbes' billionaires list.

"In the last 30 thirty years seven out of 10 people have been living in countries where economic inequality has increased," Nick Galasso, one of the co-authors of the study, told USA TODAY. "This is a trend that has been unfolding globally for the last two or three decades. What we've not seen is any political will toward curbing it."

President Obama has identified economic equality as one of the defining issues of our time and in a speech in December he said that increasing inequality "challenges the very essence of who we are as a people." In the U.S., the financially privileged - the wealthiest 1% - have "captured 95% of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90% became poorer," the Oxfam report notes.

"This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a significant threat to inclusive political and economic systems. Instead of moving forward together, people are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.

The World Economic Forum has identified income inequality as one of the greatest risks facing the world in 2014, and it will be a big topic of discussion during the organization's annual meeting Wednesday through Saturday in Davos, Switzerland.

"(Oxfam's report) is a further confirmation that the global economy is twisted out of shape," says Philip Jennings, the general secretary of the UNI Global Union, an international federation of unions based in Geneva. "These are levels of inequality that we have not seen since the 1920s."